The Spanish church

Abstract

The Spanish church of the Counter-Reformation, with its array of saints, theologians, canonists and missionaries, or the church caught in the bitter political struggles of the twentieth century, has offered more attractive fields of study to the historian than an eighteenth-century church that produced no St Theresa of Avila, no St John of the Cross, no Luis de Leon, no spectacular missionary achievements in distant and exotic lands. Even the Inquisition went about its work with a desultory spirit that would have shocked the harsh inquisitors of an earlier age. But the church of the eighteenth century, if it lacked the vitality of its predecessors, continued to be an immensely rich and powerful institution in a land where religious practice was deeply rooted and luxuriant in its variety. Moreover, an understanding of the problem of the church in modern Spain requires some knowledge of the long process of disintegration of the Old Regime church that began in the late eighteenth century and continued through the far-reaching liberal reforms carried out between 1835 and 1860. It has been fashionable to consider the history of the Spanish church as a long continuum from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella to the militant and intolerant church of the years prior to and during the civil war of the twentieth century. But the structure, economic base and mentality of the church in modern Spain are very different from those of the church in the Old Regime.